"On December 8, 2005, we published a story that wondered: Firefox 1.5: Not Ready For Prime Time? In response, some 450 (and climbing) InternetWeek, InformationWeek, TechWeb Pipelines, and Scot's Newsletter readers have sent details about their experiences with Firefox 1.5. A picture is emerging about Firefox 1.5 in the real world - on a small percentage of Windows, Mac, and Linux computers - that is less than positive."

In my Win XP SP2 setup, I have been seeing those problems. I can only go a short time before my CPU jumps to over 50%, and then starts hitting 100%. Then the whole box slows to a crawl forcing a quit. And like the article says, I often have to go into the task manager to completely close the firefox.exe. And it is chewing up a good deal of memory. This is all happening after I've turned off Flash and Java.

I still use firefox for certain sites, but mostly stick to Opera 8 - which has always "felt" lighter (i've used it since version 3) - and i love how opera includes so many things firefox needs extensions for (mainly mouse gestures).